Word on the street: Malarkey! What’s next…balderdash?

As Murray the Monster of “Sesame Street” would say: The word on the street is. . .malarkey.

Making it newly famous, of course, was Vice President Joe Biden during Thursday night’s debate. He first used “that’s a bunch of malarkey” as a comeback to VP candidate Paul Ryan’s criticism of the Obama administration’s response to the attacks in Libya.

The minute he pulled out the colorful word, which my favorite Irish priest of yore, Father McKenna, was so fond of saying, hordes of people turned to the Internet for more.

According to Yahoo! Search Data today, “The term [malarkey] jumped into the top searches on Yahoo! along with searches for [malarkey definition] and [what is malarkey].

Twitter, too, lit up with the word; Topsy.com, in fact, estimated that “malarkey” soon was being mentioned nearly 30,000 times per minute.

The most common definition for ‘malarkey’ is “nonsense; meaningless talk.” It’s also an effective, family-friendly substitute for bull—-.

The richness and strength of the word wasn’t lost on Biden, that’s for sure; he used it again to explain what he meant when he summed up another Ryan stance as “a bunch of stuff.” “What’s a bunch of stuff?” wondered moderator Martha Raddatz. “We Irish call it malarkey,” Biden said.

Ha! You just know the late-night hosts are going to have a field day with this, particularly Jason Sudeikis when he’s bound to pull out his best Joe Biden impression on “Saturday Night Live.”

When I instantly highlighted it on my Facebook page, the approval (“likes”) poured in, with a fun sidelight being friends’ suggestions of similar colorful terms that should be used more frequently.